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Up and Coming
December 18, 2017

Poor performance in Unity - SOLVED

Rift appears to be running significantly worse since updating to the new Home hub update. I attempted to leave the 'public beta', but performance stayed poor.
Is there anything I should be doing or not.

It's running in 2017.2.0p4, but I've seen the performance drop in other versions.

SOLVED: It was nVidia stuff. I killed all the nVidia background tasks in the task manager and this solved the issue.
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    13 replies

    Up and Coming
    December 19, 2017
    Ok, it was the nVidia drivers. I rolled back and it was fine.
    Fire Panda LTD
    Up and Coming
    January 15, 2018
    Actually this was not fix. I did find a fix - closing Home - but this no longer works as before.

    To go back to the problem: Performance in unity (on a 1080ti no less) tanks to 20-30fps on any scene. But NOT after I shut down Home. Closing it while Playing in Unity reverted performance to normal.

    To clarify - I had to start the scene, see the framerate tank, then close Home and it worked.

    However this no longer works. As soon as I close Home it pops back immediately when the headset is on. This causes the framerate issues to persist. 

    I have updated to all the latest drivers. This also happens both in 5.6.4 and 2017 (latest patch version) - so it's not Unity. 

    The workaround was not ideal, but it worked. It no longer does. It seems odd that Home causes this problem with Unity and is immensely frustrating to deal with as I have to develop with Unity every day.
    Fire Panda LTD
    Up and Coming
    January 17, 2018
    Here it is. 

    I've reset my computer again and also set up my touch controllers and sensors etc and I can now close home again while 'playing' in unity. This puts performance back to normal.  Home re-opens almost immediately, but the performance remains fine until I press 'play' again, although as you can appreciate it's inconvenient (and presumably not best practice) to have to close home every time I need Unity to 'play' at a reasonable level of performance. 
    Fire Panda LTD
    New Participant
    January 18, 2018
    Are you getting that low frame rate playing in Unity's Editor? Or with a
    compiled game (started after rebooting your computer, to be sure
    nothing else is slowing it down).

    I notice my own frame rates within Unity's editor are much worse than a compiled version.

    Although,
    I'm still getting much higher frames per second than you. Even in the
    editor, on a lowly GTX 970, most scenes report 45fps. That's after
    adding color correction, and SSAO to the scene too. Without any sort of
    optimization.

    I'm using Unity 2017.3.0f3. With Oculus Home and Steam VR always running.

    One of the test
    scenes was the demo from Ghost Town:
    https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/20736 . Which maintains
    45fps in most directions, except one small section drops to 9fps when
    you look at it.


    Up and Coming
    January 18, 2018
    @CaptainAwesome -  It is a problem related purely to Unity editor, but not the one you are describing.

    Performance in Unity's editor is indeed as you describe in general, but the problem I am describing happens in addition to that. It tanks to low 20s regardless of the content of the scene during 'Play' mode.

    But the problem goes away when Home is closed while in Play mode. The performance immediately picks up and improves to the levels you would expect.

    Fire Panda LTD
    January 21, 2018
    One thing to try for better in-editor performance is to make sure you've got 'Maximize on Play' checked for the Game window.  The graphics card is having to render your app to the Rift, but also Unity and all of its UI to the main monitor.  This often causes poor performance.
    Up and Coming
    January 22, 2018
    I'm pursuing other options based on Unity itself. Maybe it's related to that and my part-solution was somehow side-stepping it. No idea, but will try more things.
    Fire Panda LTD
    Up and Coming
    January 22, 2018
    No luck. I can no longer cause the problem to disappear. I believe when I first reset my PC this morning it started at the appropriate FPS - around 70 or so in the scene I am in. However it is now sitting at 20, but often as low as 6fps. 

    Looking at the profiler there seems to be something related to the CPU, with the delay at 60ms at times. This is related to editor overhead or Particles sometimes.

    To go back over the issue, I was previously able to close Home and then it would get better for some reason - revert to the correct performance, but I am no longer able to pull that trick. It stays at poor frame rate.

    Meanwhile the same scene as a build will perform at the 'correct' frame rate.
    Fire Panda LTD
    Up and Coming
    January 23, 2018
    The same identical project also performs better for other team members who run on slower hardware.
    Fire Panda LTD
    Up and Coming
    January 23, 2018
    SOLVED!!

    It was nVidia causing Unity editor to perform poorly, not Oculus at fault. I went into task manager and shut down ALL the things nVidia related there and now it runs as it should. It must have been one of those random things that 'solved' it when I shut down Home before - shutting down Home must have got around whatever nVidia was doing at the time. In any case this is sorted and not Oculus' fault. 
    Fire Panda LTD